Infandous by Elana K. Arnold

Author:Elana K. Arnold
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lerner Publishing Group

Nine

They really do drink sweet tea in the South. And damn, that shit is good. I start guzzling it almost as soon as the plane lands in Atlanta. I text Naomi that I’ve landed and sink to the floor in arrivals to wait.

So Greek mythology has become one of my hobbies lately, a source of some of my recent artistic inspirations. That and old fairy tales. The original, creepy versions. And there’s a lot of creepy shit out there. I got the watered-down version of the Greeks back in tenth grade, in a unit that combined literature and history. The two teachers—Ms. Kramer and Mrs. Austin—were stoked because it meant they got to combine the classes for six weeks and take turns going on coffee runs while one or the other of them babysat us.

Mrs. Austin, the history teacher, tried to gloss over the incestuous relationships between the gods—Zeus and Hera are siblings as well as spouses; Persephone is the offspring of Demeter and her big brother Zeus. Then there’s all the other weirdness—Zeus transforming into a swan so that he can seduce Leda (but what, exactly, is seductive about a swan?). It was funny, how Mrs. Austin sort of wanted to half introduce the stories. Like, those crazy Greeks and their crazy stories, let’s not look at them too carefully and let’s make sure to remember the definition of myth—explanation tales, things people made up way back when, before they understood how science worked, to make sense of the world around them that seemed scary and full of magic.

Is that so different, though, from what we do now? We tell stories to make ourselves feel better, to make sense of things we don’t understand. And real life is scary, and it is magical, at least life in Venice Beach. Not always the nice kind of magic, though.

Anyway, Mrs. Austin felt squidgy about the sexy times. Ms. Kramer, the English teacher, seemed to get off on the whole thing. She went into exquisite detail about all the different ways Zeus got with humans, tricking them, seducing them, and then getting them out of the way by turning them into animals, heavenly bodies, whatever worked.

She was kind of a man-hater, Ms. Kramer. She always made a point of calling on the girls first when she asked for volunteers, and more often than not, she’d shoot down a guy’s answer even though she would have nodded encouragingly if a girl had said the same thing.

She had been a women’s studies major at some liberal college back East, and her agenda seemed to be to empower girls at all costs. Of course, since we all knew that was her agenda, none of us felt all that empowered by her praise. I can’t speak for the others, but I always felt belittled by it. So I’d skip the reading and say the dumbest things I could think of to elicit one of those nodding smiles, seeing how far I could push it.

I wasn’t the only one half-assing the class.

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